Observations on politics, news, culture and humor

Monday’s links

People’s Daily: China proposes to amend its criminal code so that there would only be 55 crimes punishable death, down from a present 68. Mein Gott! To give you an idea, this amendment would get rid of the death penalty for HEINOUS crimes such as smuggling cultural relics and precious metals, issuing false VAT invoices and teaching “crime-committing methods.” This is what they didn’t tell you during the opening ceremonies in 2008. This is what glib little losers like Thomas “Can’t we be China for a day” Friedman don’t want to talk about. China may be an economic powerhouse, but it remains an anti-humanistic dictatorship worthy of scorn. Of course, that scorn would mean a lot more if we got rid of the death penalty here…

Der Spiegel International: an extremely valuable foreign perspective on the “end” of the war in Iraq. Most of the American-written pieces I’ve seen, even in the NYT, have been very patriotic and surge-friendly. This piece refuses to let us forget that probably more than 100,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq since 2003, including 535 (Iraqi estimate) or 222 (American estimate) murders in July. When a much more populous country like Mexico sees murder figures like that, we write stories about it being a failed state. When it happens in Iraq, we call it victory.

The Globe & Mail: a horrifying profile on the banality of food licensing fascism in British Columbia. Here’s a flavor for where this story is headed: Before Bowen Island beekeeper Stuart Cole could sell 25 bars of honey-infused hazelnut nougat at a local festival, he had to tell the health authority exactly how and where it was made and list the ingredients down to the nut. Then he had to cart his baking supplies to the local school’s FoodSafe-certified kitchen to make his supply for the festival. All that just to sell enough nougat to break even at BowFeast, an annual three-hour community festival celebrating food produced on Bowen Island. But at least he wasn’t selling jam. That would require a lab test to make sure bacteria wasn’t festering in it. Sweet Jesus, it’s a sweet! You can’t even sell “high-risk” home-cooked foods like guacamole and baked beans. Who asked for these regulations to be instituted? Outside of established, licensed food vendors who presumably helped write these regulations, who benefits from them?

NYT: Germany announces plans to end military conscription. Thank God! The bad news is that community service conscription remains intact, but hopefully the Germans can eliminate that soon, too. The state does not own us. Our time on this earth is finite and for the state to use the threat of force against us to take some of that time away from us is a crime of the highest order.

The Western Standard blog: remember the Jaworski family, the refugees from communist Poland who now live in Ontario and face a $50,000 fine for hosting a conference on their property? Well, it turns out that they were ratted out for their private property “zoning violation” by an anonymous tipster. It’s hard to imagine how much of a soulless, passive-aggressive twerp you’d have to be to rat some people out for using their private property in a certain way, knowing it might well ruin their lives. This blog post offers a great, emotional meditation on authority’s collaborators and zoning laws.

The Globe & Mail: a Canadian traveler writes about the ugliness of Canadian customs authorities. This was something that shocked me when I flew into Vancouver this year–I think my beard got me sent off for a secondary screening on my way out of the airport, which resulted in prying questions about my bank account and a phone call to the person I was visiting. The only good thing about the experience was that it gave me a sense for how foreign travelers must feel upon entering the U.S. and being forced to deal with our own border bullies. For shame, North America.